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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2019-11-17, 11:58

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Tried to install ReactOS on a Toshiba Portege M200. It didn't go really well. My biggest beef with ROS has always been that it isn't setup to install FROM harddisk (which is how I always install Windows). You can't start the installer from DOS. I was entertaining the idea of trying to write my own …

Re: A: drive and B: drive mismatch - really strange bug?

Posted on 2019-11-17, 06:26

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

DOS normally redirects access to B: to A: along with that prompt to switch disks when it thinks there is only one FDD. The second drive must not be set right in the BIOS or it is not being detected because of a problem with the cable or ??

Re: BIOS Modification

Posted on 2019-11-15, 11:09

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Final update on this persuit. 1) AGESA 3.5.3.1 also works, but doesn't solve anything in this case. 2) I ran across something in AMD's manual (BIOS and Kernel Developer's Guide #31116) that said the CPU speed shouldn't be more than double the NB clock. I don't know WHY it says this, as I myself have …

Re: BIOS Modification

Posted on 2019-11-13, 04:50

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I've been attacking this from multiple angles and have some info to add. 1) The microcode is located _before_ the spot where it says NCPUCODE.BIN. It's in 2KB chunks. I tried adding in the whole thing (using hex editor) from a later ROM but then CBROM 198 would show garbage values for everything …

Re: BIOS Modification

Posted on 2019-11-10, 04:27

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Today I got one of these CH341A-based USB programmers with the cable that can clip onto the chip. Note that the MSI board in the pic is not the one I want to mod, I just got it out for testing, and it took a while before I found the real BIOS chip. They are hard to ID with their microscopic writing. …

Re: BIOS Modification

Posted on 2019-11-05, 03:31

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nice timing. I've been researching how to increase Phenom II support in AM2+ boards. So far I've dumped the old BIOS and extracted the various components. It's an Award/Phoenix which can be picked apart with CBROM, or alternatively just look for the -lh5- marker in a hex editor to find the …

Re: Fast Ethernet on ISA

Posted on 2019-11-02, 00:43

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

1.4MB/sec looks pretty close to what ISA IDE cards get for data throughput. BIOS disk routines use a REP INSW instruction to read sectors from the IDE port. Maybe network drivers are also using this. I imagine that ISA DMA using the 8237 wouldn't be any better, since the DMA controller was spec'ed …

Re: 486 SX 16 & 20 MHz

Posted on 2019-10-28, 14:31

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Actually it made total sense. Apparently we disagree on that. It doesn't make sense to us, but maybe you have to think like an MBA. The reason I say that is because at various points after the time period in question, we know that vendors pulled exactly this type of nonsense. They artificially …

Re: Undervolting CPU to match lower TDP support of motherboard?

Posted on 2019-10-28, 14:08

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

If the relevant BIOS setting exists, try changing the startup P-state to keep the watts down during the booting process. It should say P0,P1,P2,P3, or P4, and P0 is the fastest so any other setting would lower the speed/voltage.

Re: 486 SX 16 & 20 MHz

Posted on 2019-10-27, 14:28

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I used to have a 486SX-16. It was pretty close to a 386DX-25 with cache. IIRC, the PX486P3 board had undocumented jumper settings for 16 and 20MHz. I'm sure some other boards also have such undocumented settings.

Re: S939 Athlon 64 3200 vs S478 Prescott 3.4GHz

Posted on 2019-10-24, 22:36

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What's wrong with nForce 4? One of my AM2 boards is an Asus M2N-MX SE+ which currently has 1200 hours uptime.

Re: IBM 16-bit PCMCIA Audio Adapter SB compatibility

Posted on 2019-10-19, 10:22

in Marvin \ Sound

in Marvin \ Sound

I always wondered how the 755c audio compared with the PCMCIA audio. Playing MIDI files using the PCDEMO program sounded like they were both using the same (rather strange) instrument set. Running Adlib-compatible DOS games on the 755c used a similarly unusual synthesizer that sounded nothing like …

Re: Best GPU with S-Video out

Posted on 2019-10-14, 13:24

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hopefully you end up with a card that can do unscaled TV out. My old FX5200 could do a 720x480 mode (including overscan) which was ideal for stuff like watching DVDs on a big CRT at the time. I think you'd want something like that for emulating consoles that ran at 480i. When I upgraded to a newer …

Re: Interesting links

Posted on 2019-10-12, 02:36

in Release Announcements

in Release Announcements

Ran across this DPMI host which is supposed to work with 286 protected mode programs (as well as 386). I didn't even realize this existed. http://www.sudleyplace.com/dpmione/ Also, a thread about getting FreeBASIC to run on Win32S: https://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27912

Re: 486 cache/ram speed issue with write-back

Posted on 2019-10-03, 15:49

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

You can also just go to QBASIC and issue this: Copy code to clipboard 1 OUT &H22,&H50 2 ? INP(&H23) The Genoa X4 BIOS is 64KB, so 27512 or equivalent should work.

Re: 486 cache/ram speed issue with write-back

Posted on 2019-10-02, 16:24

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

As explained in the data sheet, the chipset registers are accessed through port I/O. $22 is the index port and $23 is the data port. The source for SIS.EXE looks like this: sectionbss ff1.d: resd derp: resd 32768 resd 32768 sectiondata dd 0 sectioncode callex ,initplatform beginfunc localvar …

Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2019-09-29, 15:50

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Old CRTs from the '80s that were designed to use one scan rate will not blank and they can malfunction if there is an "out-of-range" signal coming in. I'm talking about plain VGA monitors like an IBM 8512 for instance. I never saw a monitor get fried but a few times the protect circuit would engage …

Re: Tor on XP

Posted on 2019-09-29, 15:42

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The point of tor is to conceal/anonymize traffic. Whether it does that reliably has always been questionable in my mind. Government funding was used in the development of tor, for one thing. And you don't know who is running the exit nodes. Someone who controls enough exit nodes can effectively …

Re: Bios Hunt: GENOA 486VLG - X4

Posted on 2019-09-28, 15:06

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The multiplier is controlled by a pin on the CPU, nothing to do with the BIOS.

Re: 486 cache/ram speed issue with write-back

Posted on 2019-09-28, 14:58

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I like datasheets. I think I've been able to enable WB with dirty bits using a DOS program. Check it out... This board has a voltage regulator and accepts DX4 CPUs natively, so I would assume I'm running at 3.3 or 3.45V, it's not user configurable but the board does mostly everything automatically …

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